Quakers and Cowboys: Italian Mythologies and Stereotypes of Americans from Piccinni to Puccini

Abstract

American myths and stereotypes have conquered an extraordinary space in the collective imagination of modern Italy, often coexisting with classical mythologies. In the 1970s, a production by RAI Cinema of The Odyssey (Odissea: Le avventure di Ulisse) directed by Franco Rossi competed with spaghetti Westerns directed by Sergio Leone to satisfy the insatiable popular appetite for epics. Ulysses, the free and brave Greek traveler in an unknown and fantastic ancient Mediterranean world, appealed to the public as much as the brave and independent American cowboy inhabiting the fantastic Wild West of Leone’s movies. Sergio Leone, who started his career as an assistant director of Verdi’s Traviata and sword-and-sandal films like Helen of Troy, was largely influenced by cultural models and mythological constructs that were not endemically American, which explains why his representation of the American West often appears peculiar or even exotic to an American audience. Film historian Christopher Frayling remarked that “most critics of Leone’s films complained that they ‘lacked the true spirit of the Western,’ which, of course, was their purpose”; in fact, as Frayling observed, “rather than invoking the traditional morality of the Western, Leone turned the genre into a robust Mediterranean carnival.” His movies, therefore, may be more useful for an understanding of Italian twentieth-century cultural and political history than of the American westward expansion, considering that Leone, “as a child growing up during a time of fascist repression, had—like many interwar Italians—viewed America as a model of freedom, a glimpse of modernity and promise.” A similar argument can be made for Puccini’s operatic representation of the American West. In spite of Puccini’s use of American literary sources by playwright David Belasco for two out of his three operas based on American subjects (Madama Butterfly and La fanciulla del West), a reviewer of the 1910 premiere of The Girl of the Golden West at the Met asked the rhetorical question, “How could Puccini write an American opera? How could he realize the American type?” and